by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Loretta Lynn show KPBS ran a Frontline episode that proved unexpectedly interesting;
“Uncovering Saudi Arabia,” about the attempts of Saudi dissidents to expose the
kingdom’s poverty and corruption and
the horribly repressive policies of the regime in repressing them, including
executing dissidents (especially Shi’a clerics — Saudi Arabia has a Sunni
Muslim majority and the royal family are hard-core Sunnis who run the country
by the Wahhabi version of Sharia law, but the oil-rich areas in the East are
largely Shi’a) like Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr, a Shi’a religious leader who was one
of the victims of a mass execution of 47 people in January 2016. His nephew Ali
Nimr was one of the key sources for this show until he himself was arrested and
sentenced to death, though according to the final credit roll he remains alive
and the Saudi government has said they don’t intend to kill him. Apparently
this is one of the quirks of the Saudi legal system: they can arrest you, try
you in secret, sentence you to death and then keep you alive but still in
custody — or even alive and out
of custody — but leave the death sentence hanging over you so they can kill you
any time they want. Another Saudi dissident, Raif Badawi, became an
international cause celebre when
the government arrested him and gave him a 10-year sentence as well as 1,000
lashes (the Saudi government not only whips its enemies but does so in public
and films it to intimidate the people into shutting up and not resisting) for
running a blog that frequently posted secretly filmed footage (some of which
appears in this film) of conditions in Saudi Arabia, including the poverty in
which many of the kingdom’s residents live (despite Saudi Arabia’s famous
status as the world’s number one oil producer) and the way women are hassled in
shopping malls by the religious police (formally called the Society for the
Preservation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice), leading to absurd images
like the religious police stopping women in front of a Victoria’s Secret outlet
in a mall in Riyadh and hassling them and threatening them with arrest for not
being veiled.
Not much of this is surprising but it is an interesting account of how a major U.S. ally in
the Middle East treats its citizens — and how determined the Saudi government
in general and the recently crowned king, Salman (he replaced his brother
Abdullah at age 79 — the nation’s founder, Ibn Saud, for some reason willed
that his sons would succeed him in succession, so the kingdom has been ruled by
seven of Saud’s sons in succession instead of allowing power to pass to the
next generation — not even the next generation of the Saud family!), are to
make sure no Arab Spring-style revolution happens in Saudi Arabia. Apparently
there were hopes among young Saudis that Salman would be more liberal than his
predecessor, and they were dashed just as thoroughly as the hopes of Syrians that
Bashir al-Assad would be more liberal than his father Hafez when Hafez died and Bashir took over.
Another activist profiled in Saudi Arabia Uncovered is Loujain Hathloul, who decided to commit civil
disobedience by driving her car into Saudi Arabia from the more socially
liberal United Arab Emirates — the Saudi ban on women driving has probably
become more famous and attracted more media coverage than the ban on them
voting (of course in an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia’s elections are
pretty meaningless anyway). She was arrested almost immediately — and her car
was destroyed — but later the government decided to liberalize slightly and
allow a few women to run for local offices. Hathloul accordingly became a
candidate — only to be ruled off the ballot by the religious authorities
(somehow U.S. propaganda portrays the power of the clergy in Iran to rule on
who can and can’t run for office as a horrible oppression but ignores the
similar rule in our ally, Saudi Arabia!), though she intends to try again. The
fact that the Arab Spring has been pretty much an historical disaster — it’s
either produced failed states like Tunisia or Libya, or provoked
counter-revolutions like the one that re-established the military dictatorship
in Egypt — doesn’t help the odds for peaceful reform in Saudi Arabia. Nor does
the awareness among U.S. policymakers of what Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said
in one of the Republican Presidential debates that, whatever they do to their
own people, the specific interests of the United States in the Middle East
(mainly oil and Israel) are better off with its countries ruled by people like
Saddam Hussein, Muammar Quadafi, Hosni Mubarak (and his current military
successor, Sisi), Bashir al-Assad and the Saudi family.
